Digital Archive digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org International History Declassified March 01, 1954 Report of Deng Xiaoping, Chen Yi, and Tan Zhenlin concerning the Discussion Meeting of the Rao Shushi Question Citation: “Report of Deng Xiaoping, Chen Yi, and Tan Zhenlin concerning the Discussion Meeting of the Rao Shushi Question,” March 01, 1954, History and Public Policy Program Digital Archive, Hubei Pronvincial Archives, SZAA-3371. Translation from Frederick C. Teiwes, Politics at Mao’s Court: Gao Gang and Party Factionalism in the Early 1950s (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1990), 245-252. http://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/121328 Summary: Deng Xiaoping, Chen Yi, and Tan Zhenlin summarize the seven meetings held to discuss the purge of Rao Shushi. Credits: This document was made possible with support from the MacArthur Foundation. Original Language: Chinese Contents: English Translation To the Central Committee: The following is a report on the results of the series of discussions on the question of Rao Shushi called by the decision of the Secretarial of the Central Committee. A total of seven meetings were held. The first four meetings focused on the facts of the mistakes committed by Comrade Rao Shushi. At the fifth and sixth meetings, many comrades spoke and continued to expose his mistakes. Rao spoke at the seventh meeting, making a self- criticism. Comrades Deng Xiaoping and Chen Yi then made addresses to the meeting, thereby concluding the discussions. The meetings were attended by twenty-six comrades including some from East China who were in Beijing or who had been transferred to Beijing, as well as comrades of central departments and ministries who had work relations with Rao. At the concluding meeting on the seventh day, sixty-six comrades from the large administrative regions and from central departments and ministries came to listen to Rao’s self-criticism. The discussions earnestly verified and exposed the concrete facts of the mistakes committed by Comrade Rao Shushi. Rao often dodged and hedged, hence the importance of verification. In the process of verification, Comrade Rao admitted some and denied some of his mistakes. After various comrades spoke on the fifth and sixth meetings, Rao was still quibbling on important issues. The discussions drew the following conclusions on the question of Comrade Rao Shushi: I. According to the facts as verified by the discussions, Comrade Rao Shushi has been shown to be an extremely individualistic bourgeois careerist. His personal ambitions were constantly on the ascendant. His most glaring crime was his and Gao Gang's activities in 1953 to split the Party. 1. The discussions examined the question of how Comrade Rao Shushi undermined the prestige of the central leadership and disrupted Party unity in 1953 from the time of the National Conference on Financial and Economic Work to the National Conference on Organization Work. During this period, Rao Shushi's activities completely exposed him as a sinister careerist and that, in fact, he had already formed an anti-Party alliance with Gao Gang. After he was appointed director of the central organization department in February 1953, to achieve his infamous aim of climbing step by step to a higher position, Rao, starting out from his own ugly thoughts of sectarian power struggle, began to distort political life within the central leadership. He erroneously estimated that certain comrades were on their way out and certain others were on their way up. Based on these ridiculous speculations, he energetically stirred up dissension inside the Party. He and Gao Gang, making use of Comrade An Ziwen's erroneous proposal about candidates for central organizations which was An's personal opinion, fabricated and widely spread talk that certain comrades formed a faction, a “circle,” and that a certain leading central comrade was a supporter of this faction or circle. He told people that the Financial and Economic Work Conference had already carried out struggle against so and so of the “'circle,” and that another person of the “circle” would be struggled against after the conference. This talk proves that he and Gao Gang were together trying to create chaos and split the Party. Subsequently, before the Financial and Economic Conference had even ended, without prior knowledge and consent from anyone in the central leadership, he baselessly made up all kinds of pretexts to instigate a struggle against Comrade An Ziwen inside the organization department, because he thought An was a member of what they called the “circle.” The struggle Rao instigated was, on the one hand, to achieve his aim, by the most ruthless means possible, of cowing or squeezing out Comrade An Ziwen and others, but more importantly, he was utilizing this struggle to demonstrate his utmost eagerness in support of and participation in Gao Gang's struggle to split the Party and seize the supreme power of the Party and state. Rao's struggle against Comrade An Ziwen not only was not reported to the Center beforehand and naturally did not get its approval, but after the Center discovered his mistake and put a halt to it, Rao was not at all present. He openly rejected the Center's intervention and continued with the struggle. In his struggle against Comrade An Ziwen, Rao alleged that one of An' s mistakes was his resentment of the Financial and Economic Conference. But when Rao's ignominious activities and manipulations were exposed among the leading cadres at the National Organization Work Conference, Rao shamelessly told Comrade An Ziwen that he did not say it was An who resented the Financial and Economic Conference but some other leading comrade of the Center. That is to say, his struggle was not really targeted at Comrade An Ziwen, but at the other leading central comrade. These facts prove that it was no coincidence that Rao instigated the struggle, but that it was fully planned. He was determined, by hook or by crook, to damage the prestige of the Party Center, oppose central leading comrades, participate in Gao Gang's anti-Party activities, and engage in political speculation to achieve his futile ambition of climbing to a higher position after he succeeded and in an effort to consolidate and develop his despicable goal of personal power. In his actions, Rao has completely violated the Party's standpoint, principles, and discipline. Rao Shushi, in following the anti-Party activities of Gao Gang, is actually demonstrating the attempt of the bourgeoisie to corrupt, subvert, and split our Party. 2. The discussions examined the behavior of Comrade Rao Shushi over many years in the past and proved that his and Gao Gang's 1953 activities to split the Party were the outcome of the development of their unbridled personal ambitions, which they had harbored for a long time. They were not random acts of Rao' s but were rooted in his personal history. The following three incidents can be cited. a. Comrade Rao Shushi's autumn 1943 struggle against Comrade Chen Yi at Huanghuatang, the site of the New Fourth Army headquarters. According to exposes by comrades Zeng Shan, Lai Bozhu, Zhang Yunyi, Liu Xiao, Liu Changsheng, and Chen Yi, and the facts admitted to by Rao himself during the discussions, particularly in view of the cable Rao sent to the Center at the time regarding the struggle against Comrade Chen Yi and Comrade Mao Zedong's return cable, the incident can be characterized as an out-and-out sectarian activity by Rao Shushi to squeeze out Comrade Chen Yi by utilizing-certain isolated defects and mistakes of Chen's. Rao neither consulted Comrade Chen Yi before he started the struggle nor asked the Center for permission, but took the action arbitrarily. He organized a struggle among the leading officers of the units directly under the New Fourth Army's command and charged Comrade Chen Yi, entirely erroneously, with so-called opposition to Comrade Mao Zedong, opposition to the system of political commissars in the army, as well as with the crime of trying to drive out Rao. He thus hoodwinked a part of the officers in order to hit at and squeeze out Comrade Chen Yi. In his cable to the Center, Rao invented lies about Chen Yi being irresponsible in work. At the same time, he also lied that he had given well-intentioned help to Chen Yi but got no results, and hence he had to ask the Center to send a replacement who was strong in both ethics and capability for Chen Yi. Rao did all this to reach his aim of kicking out Comrade Chen Yi. In 1944, Comrade Chen Yi, in accordance with a cable from the Center, was transferred to Yan'an. In a cable to the Central China Bureau, Comrade Chen Yi made a self-criticism of certain mistakes of liberalism that he had committed on the question of unity in the Central China Bureau. Comrade Mao Zedong also sent a cable to the Central China Bureau pointing out that the nature of Comrade Chen Yi's past mistake in chairing a debate at the Seventh Congress of the Red Fourth Anny in western Fujian [in 1929] was not that of the general line, and that it had been resolved long since, and therefore should not be brought up again. Comrade Mao Zedong also pointed out that Comrade Chen Yi had performed many meritorious deeds in the periods of the civil war and the Anti-Japanese war. The conflict between Chen and Rao at Huanghuatang, Comrade Mao Zedong further stated, was of the nature of work relations. He finally instructed the Central China Bureau to end the debate and restore unity. In a return cable, Comrade Rao Shushi continued to maintain an attitude of opposition to Comrade Mao Zedong's cable and Comrade Chen Yi's self-criticism.